From his next voyage he returned leaving the Indies in flames, loaded with plunder, and smoking the new herb tobacco to the amazement of his countrymen.
Philip II was preparing a vast armada against England, when Drake appeared with thirty sail on the Spanish coast, destroyed a hundred ships, swept like a hurricane from port to port, took a galleon laden with treasure off the western islands, and returned to Plymouth with his enormous plunder.
Next year Drake was vice-admiral to Lord Howard in the destruction of the Spanish armada.
In 1589 he led a fleet to deliver Portugal from the Spaniards, wherein he failed.
Then came his last voyage in company with his first commander, Sir John Hawkins. Once more the West Indies felt the awful weight of his arm, but now there were varying fortunes of defeat, of reprisals, and at the end, pestilence, which struck the fleet at Nombre de Dios, and felled this mighty seaman. His body was committed to the sea, his memory to the hearts of all brave men.
Queen Elizabeth
XXXII
A. D. 1587 THE FOUR ARMADAS
Here let us call a halt. We have come to the climax of the great century, the age of the Renaissance, when Europe was born again; of the Reformation, when the Protestants of the Baltic fought the Catholics of the Mediterranean for the right to worship in freedom; and of the sea kings who laid the foundations of our modern world.
Islam had reached her fullest flood of glory with the fleets of Barbarossa, the armies of the Sultan Suleiman, and all the splendors of Akbar the Magnificent, before her ebb set downward into ruin.